Dear Inkscape Developers: First of all, thanks for such a great design program. We use it in a daily basis in a proffesional enviroment for our work. A few years ago, before Inkscape were born, I was more involved in the UI design of Sodipodi. This weekend, tidying up a bit my folders, I found this idea for Sodipodi, and I think is still a nice dialog revamp for Inkscape, so I decided to send it to you in case it serves for something else than wasting diskspace. It's a mock up based upon the Gimp brushes dialog. It has also some of Illustrator "way of design". The point is I have my swatches in my color palette where I can rename and edit them with the appropiate button. The solid, line gradient, elliptical gradient and tile gradient are just a categorization but in fact I could have all swatches I'm using in the same window (adding a [View all] button). Let's explain this further. When I need to add a swatch (plain, gradient or tile) no color or the default color is asigned to the new object. Then I select the swatch and either duplicate or edit the color in a similar dialog as actual Inkscape dialog. Also, we could have the edit swatch dialog tabbed in the one I present or attached etc. In fact, is a waste of space to have two identical tabs for doing exactly the same function, which is editing swatches or colors: the fill and the border tabs. I propose to have as a first tab the one in my mockup, the second one the editing colors one an the third one the stroke style, witdth etc one. Of course, another control to switch between fill mode or border mode should be necessary for the new tab, which could be very similar to the Gimps one (background/foreground colors). A kind of law?: Choosing a property, style or color shouldn't be in the same area of Editing that very property, style or color. It drives to errors when accidentally move a slider or change something with a slight click or the mouse wheel. Asigning a property should be in it's own area/tab/dialog and editing should be separate from it.
If somebody wants me to further develop this idea, more defined mockups and actions story board, etc. (I'm sorry I can't code): Just ask me as I'm willing to improve Inkscape UI and productivity in this matter.
Yours: Néstor Díaz
